Heavily over-optimised websites are in for a shock as Google begins to penalise ‘old skool’ SEO tactics.

• Keyword-stuffed page titles? Not helping!
• Inappropriate internal links? Don’t do it, dudes.
• Crappy link-filled footers? Are you serious? That is so 2002.
• Weird keyword-rich blocks that serve no useful purpose? Get out of here!
• You have back-links from dodgy sites? Off my Christmas card list.
• Almost-duplicate pages. You don’t fool anyone. Grow up.

Great stuff from SEOmoz — as per usual.

There’s no substitute for well-written, natural language. Contact BuzzedUp if your site is guilty of the SEO crimes above.

Image via kurzweilai.net

Potential clients want to know how others judge your personal skills and capabilities. So just how good is your reputation?

This was the question posed by ex-TV presenter, event moderator and professional speaker, Roy Sheppard, at last night’s excellent Bath & Bristol Marketing Network event, billed as ‘Reputation Management.’

Brand reputation in our DNA

I suspect Roy’s talk had originally been crafted for non-marketing people, as there was much included that I would hope many marketers already know and do. Certainly I would expect — given that this was a networking event for marketers — many in the room had ‘brand reputation management’ in their DNA.

That’s not to say the talk wasn’t inspiring. It certainly was. My favourite takeaways from the 30 energetic minutes were these gems on ‘testimonials’:

1. If you lose business because of how your reputation is perceived, try to find out what specifically was the problem. Then gather positive testimonials from past clients to counter the negative perception.
2. Testimonials are timeless. You don’t have to date them. A 15-year-old testimonial may be from an earlier part of your life, but your skills and abilities are now even greater.
3. Ask your clients “What are you REALLY buying from me?” — and then emphasise these characteristics in testimonials. (I may have inferred this last one).

Bath & Bristol Marketing network is one of those rare LinkedIn groups that successfully ‘bleeds’ into the real world. There are excellent speakers from time to time, plus good networking, and the venue changes fairly frequently, a good thing in my view.

Further information

• Here’s a version of Roy’s presentation slides.
• A recent book, How to be the One, is available in paperback at Amazon.

People who duplicate all their Twitter and LinkedIn updates by default should be shot at dawn.

Twitter and LinkedIn are two different social networks, each with a subtle but distinct character and etiquette. Duplicating everythingyou post will not double your reach; it will simply piss people off.

Just because you can doesn't mean you have to

I use LinkedIn in for a certain type of business conversation and networking. Twitter feels like a quite different platform,  more a mix of social and business chat and engagement.

I am not alone in thinking lazy duplication across these platforms (and, God forbid, Facebook too) adds no value. Why choose to send ALL tweets to LinkedIn (or the other way round, I don’t care which way it is, the annoyance factor is the same)?

Let me be clear. Yes, on occasion, a tweet may be suitable for the LinkedIn audience and vice versa. I’ve done that and will again. But NOT ALL MY SODDING TWEETS.

How do you stop tweets appearing in your LinkedIn newsfeed?

Unfortunately there is no way to suppress ONLY updates originating on Twitter. So these are your two choices:

1. Hide updates from selected users (click the grey ‘Hide’ link top right corner of any update).
2. Remove a connection from your network (go Contacts/Connections, check the name and Remove Connections, top right)

I’d be delighted if anyone has a solution to this issue. Please let me know in the comments below — many thanks.

Inbound marketing is a set of marketing strategies and techniques focused on pulling relevant targets and prospects towards a business. It is at the heart of how I work with clients and I am honoured to share Hubspot’s 2012 State of Inbound Marketing report.

The report is based on survey results from 970+ companies. Insights include:

• How to drive more leads at a lower cost for your business
• What to expect from the future of inbound marketing.

Whether you are an inbound marketing convert or not, the invaluable 2012 State of Inbound Marketing Report is available free of charge.

The full report contains further proof — if any were needed — that marketing with content across the web is the most effective form of marketing for many businesses.

The five key takeaways from the report include:

1. Inbound marketing is maintaining its low-cost advantage
2. Marketing budgets continue to shift to inbound channels
3. Social media proved to be an important source of leads for 62% of the businesses interviewed
4. Google+ is making an impact. 40% of marketers see it as “useful”, “important” or “critical”
5. Blogging is increasingly recognised as a crucial business function.

I’m delighted to be an Inbound Marketing Certified Professional equipped with all the tools to deliver profitable marketing projects for my clients.  Please contact me if you’d like to know more about how your business can benefit from inbound marketing.

Now here’s a good idea: a community of successful entrepreneurs pooling their considerable, combined skills to make a difference to society. DO SMITH is harnessing the talents of some top Bristol businesspeople to do just that.

DO SMITH’s unique service supports forward-looking social enterprises that need to:

• Achieve stronger commercial success
• Generate more profit and
• Invest in their social goals.

I’m delighted to be involved. Steve King (of F-works and founder of DO SMITH) asked me to consult on social media, PR and content strategy. Working alongside Bristol-based PR agency Brandon Hill, we’ve been able to achieve excellent local coverage:

1. Rob Law of Trunki lends his support to DO SMITH on Bristol Business News. He also gets a great feature on top local news site Bristol24-7.
2. Steve King (founder) appeared on the Bristol community radio station BCFM (on air from around 5-mins); and is given the Friday Business Profile here.
3. DO SMITH was featured on several Bristol Local People news sites, for example Clifton People.
4. Friska (DO SMITH entrepreneur partners) discussed their involvement in this business profile on Bristol24-7.

Steve King explains the core service DO SMITH offers social enterprise:

“It’s the plateaus in business, the hurdles and obstacles where we can help. We’re harnessing the drive and expertise of a bunch of entrepreneurs to solve specific issues and offer practical solutions for people running social enterprises.”

To join the community of entrepreneurs, or to request help for your social enterprise, contact Steve King or Antony Clark on 07766 263 991 or at mail@do-smith.co.uk.

In Brent Leary’s Strategically Social: 5 Keys to Becoming a Social Business he dares to recommend using technology to semi-automate the social marketing process.

I applaud.

It’s about efficiency, after all.

“Automating routine operations frees up even more time that could be better spent focusing on finding ways to more meaningfully engage with customers.” (Leary)

Social media purists may get uppity at the suggestion of scheduling or triggering marketing activity on social platforms, but hey, we’ve all got businesses to run, and I want a holiday next summer. I’d rather focus on interesting client-facing activity than do boring ‘factory work’.

There are plenty of tools to support busy community managers who want time to be truly social. So let’s use them.

Image via Making the Modern World

I’ve lost count of the number of times people say they’ve had it with LinkedIn because they “get too many LinkedIn emails”. Change your LinkedIn Group email settings, people!

Filtering and managing the volume of LinkedIn email is a crucial if you want to remain sane. LinkedIn makes it easy to constrain and shape the email your receive.

However, let’s pause for a moment… Before adjusting the frequency and type of emails you receive (which is easy to do, trust me) the first thing to do is review your Group memberships. If you’re in a Group, but can’t remember why you joined, the time has come to cut and run.

“I refuse to join any Group that would have me as a member”

We all dip in and out of Groups, depending on what initiatives or industry sectors we need to know about. Time marches on, things change and those Groups become redundant.

There probably several ways to leave a Groups on LinkedIn, but here’s how I do it:

• Mouse over Groups in the navigation, click on Your Groups, and scroll to identify redundant groups.
• Click on a Group name and mouse over the More tab in that Group’s sub-navigation.
• Click on Your Settings, scroll down and look right for the grey ‘Leave Group’ button.

Leaving a Group a quite a long-winded process. I’d be interested to hear of any quicker method.

Assuming your Group membership is now aligned with your LinkedIn objectives, it’s time to adjust the amount and type of emails you get from those Groups:

• Mouse over your name and choose Settings.
• Click on Groups, Companies and Applications
• Click on Set the Frequency of Group emails and choose from the options.

Finally, refine your general LinkedIn Email Settings.

• While in the Settings page Find Email Preferences and work through the  options.
• The two most important ones (that constrain the volume of mail you receive) are Type of message and Frequency of message.

All done!

Image via My Atlas Moms

My dad passed away before Christmas. He was 86 and died of cancer — ‘old age’ as some have put it. Although our family had plenty of time to prepare for the inevitable, I found it almost unbearable… to watch him fade away over the last days, his arms making slow semaphore movements as we talked to him, unsure if he could hear us.

My mum, sister and I were at his bedside when he died. His breathing stopped and I felt a great surge of love flow through the room. I am not going to dwell on this personal loss, but it has affected me in all sorts of ways, one being that I’ve found it very difficult to write anything meaningful.

I did write my dad’s funeral eulogy, with help from all my sisters and brother, and that was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to write. Since then I can’t seem to write. Along with music — a huge help over these last weeks — writing has always been important for me, so I am trying to start again, and maybe this post will be part of the process.

I am going to share this small detail from the eulogy. It gives an insight into the character of my wonderful dad.

As a teenager, I chanced upon my dad in the back room at our house, where he kept his books. He was sitting quite still. His eyes were shut and his head was bowed. A passer-by might have reasonably assumed dad was praying, except my father had no interest in religion, preferring the works of Karl Popper. Nevertheless dad sat there a very long time, unmoving. When at last he raised his head and opened his eyes, I asked him, “What are you up to, dad?” He waited a moment and blinked, his eyes adjusting to a new light, and said, “I was thinking, of course.”

Goodbye dad, I’m thinking of you.

I let out a hollow laugh when I received this LinkedIn InMail from a social media marketing trainer:

The sender — who works part time with a well-known marketing institute — has held down social media roles with several agencies, has 500+ connections and several glowing references. But he got his targeting badly wrong on this occasion. A cursory glance at my site would have told him that, no thank you, I don’t want any training in social media marketing.

We all make mistakes. I’ve made plenty. There will be more to come.

But I thought this example of a scatter-shot mailing serves to demonstrate how easy it is to do bad marketing. It’s not enough to excel at one aspect (such as social media) if you are going to utterly cock-up another (direct email marketing in this case). Rather, you need a rounded skillset to offer a confident marketing service.

Well, I suppose it’s only a question of time until I drop a similar clanger. Until then, adieu.

‘Buyer personas’ are archetypes of the people who have the biggest impact on your revenues and profit. Use this checklist to begin the process of creating a rich description of your ideal targets.

I am often surprised by senior executives who struggle to describe their target markets, segment by segment. The creation of buyer personas is a great way to get managers to focus on this basic marketing principle. This handy checklist will get you started:

The basics

1. Gender?
2. Age?
3. Marital status?
4. Children?
5. Geographic location?
6. Educational background?
7. What media consumed?
8. Drives what car?
9. Shops where?
10. How many holidays per year?

Work

1. Job title
2. Rank their influence on buying decisions
3. Who else in the business is involved in the buyer decision?
4. How profitable has this person been in the past?
5. Is she a repeat buyer?
6. What problems does he have on his desk TODAY?
7. What takes up their time?
8. What key initiatives are they working on TODAY? What is at stake if this goes wrong? What will reward be if it goes right?
9. What motivates or frustrates their work?
10. What single thing would make their work life better?
11. What ‘big win’ would they like to announce at the next management meeting?
12. What would make them look good in the eyes of their boss?
13. What hurdles do they jump to achieve their goals and metrics?
14. What process does this person go through when evaluating business purchases?
15. What are her/his views on the state of the industry/vertical?
16. What information resources do they rely on?
17. What communities, associations, networks does this person belong to?
18. What are the buyers’ highest priorities? Cost, speed, quality?
19. What ‘solution’ is the buyer currently using?
20. Why is the buyer not 100% happy with the current solution?
21. Is there any major change looming that will make your service irrelevant in the near- to mid-future

Personal

1. Non-work activities?
2. What do their photos and mementos (in their office) say about them?
3. Favourite sports or pastimes?
4. What is their personal passion?

Use this checklist in conjunction with the other posts in my short series on the power of buyer personas:

• Use buyer personas to hone your marketing messages
• How buyer personas help match problems with solutions
• How many buyer personas should I produce?